


from this side

by doublejoint



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Ghosts, M/M, POV First Person, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23418649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: “I can’t believe you’d just steal your sister’s man like that.”“Oh, fuck off.”
Relationships: Andy Barbour/Theodore Decker
Kudos: 9





	from this side

**Author's Note:**

> the title is a play on lyrics from the music used in the first trailer, 'otherside' by perfume genius
> 
> this is first person pov because i couldn't do theo's pov and not have it be that way.
> 
> death jokes, smoking, drug references, background theo/kitsey

Andy and his father were buried at Trinity Cemetery, which, as Mrs. Barbour was sure to remind me several times, was the only active mausoleum in Manhattan. She was at a point where she could talk about it in almost a normal way, the fake-casual way I would talk about my mother dying, focusing on the details, how Platt had pushed them to do it there instead of up in New England in a family plot. I didn’t think it mattered too much; after all, there had been nothing of my mother to bury and I had no opinion one way or the other of visiting my father’s remains; if there was a headstone or a marker it wouldn’t change the fact that they were here and then they weren’t, and what that had meant. And the family never all seemed to go together, so I never went with them. Maybe they never went at all.

I took the bus up to the Cloisters one Thursday, to avoid work (or that’s what I let Hobie believe, behind my thin excuse of looking for ideas) but mostly for the atmosphere, the stone building in the middle of the park and the musty smell, different enough from the antiques I worked with all day. On the way back, I happened to glance out the window as we passed the cemetery, the grounds raised behind a mossy stone wall, awkwardly-placed on the incline of the hill. I had time, and the stop request button had been pushed for the next stop. 

I got off behind a woman about my age who was speaking in rapid Spanish into her headphones; it sounded like an argument of some kind. I stuck my phone in my pocket and headed back to the next block. I hadn’t any idea where the grave would be; I could end up looking for hours, not find it, and get stuck on a rush-hour subway car. I didn’t even know why I wanted to look for it--we were long past any formality of me asking Andy for his sister’s hand in marriage. (Not that either of us wouldn’t laugh if I even tried--or at least, if we were still in school together, but that had been before almost everything, and I had been so different, and Andy, despite still hating the water, probably had, too--Shit, how well had we really know each other? We’d been like bumper cars, smashing together a couple different times due to circumstances.)

The woman with the headphones turned and headed down 153rd, and I crossed the street and then turned toward the open cemetery gates halfway down the hill.

There didn’t seem to be any other visitors. The weather wasn’t particularly nice, grey skies and temperature a little lower than when I’d set out that morning, so I pushed my hands down into my pockets. It didn’t look like rain, but I couldn’t be too sure. Groups of pigeons and crows dotted the clusters of headstones, walking in circles and jabbing their beaks at one another. A few headstones had fresh-looking flowers, and many had grown over with moss. What was I looking for? If Platt had been in charge of all this, what kind of markers would he have chosen?

I found a newer-looking headstone crowded in between two that were tilted away from it, as if the middle one had grown out of the ground and displaced them like a massive, sudden tree. 

Of course, that was then, the name BARBOUR and then below it CHANCE, some blank space, and then ANDREW. Andy would have hated that, sharing a headstone with his father, with room for his siblings below that (Kitsey had mentioned, several times, wanting to be cremated, but that wouldn’t stop whoever was in charge of the thing from etching her name on there too, I supposed). I racked my brain for something to do or say, but my thoughts kept landing on the idea of twelve-year-old Andy laughing at me for not knowing what to do. He’d lent me a couple of volumes of  _ Bleach _ way back when; hadn’t the main guy gone to his mother’s grave? I felt like lighting up a cigarette, closed my hand around the restaurant matchbook in my right pocket, and for a second I thought I heard a dry laugh. My fingers tightened; I glanced up, then behind me. Nothing.

I told myself to relax, that I was just being paranoid, that I had too much leftover anxiety after everything, and took out a cigarette. I stuck it between my lips and took out the matchbook.

“They’ll kick you out for that.”

I snatched the cigarette out of my mouth. Standing in front of me was a guy maybe a few years younger than me, definitely shorter, with familiar-looking features and wire-frame glasses. His khakis were wrinkled as if he’d slept in them, and for a second I couldn’t place him, perhaps a friend of a friend I’d seen on Facebook or a customer’s reluctant kid a few years grown up. Because no way in hell was it Andy.

“Wipe off your glasses,” he said. “Put the cigarette away. I’ll still be here.”

I did what he said to, and he was right. 

“See?” said Andy. “Right here.”

I hadn’t taken any drugs that day--none in a week, and less every month. I rarely hallucinated anymore, even with strong doses of the really good stuff, and as far as I knew this morning’s cigarettes, coffee, and toast had not been laced with anything. 

“What the fuck, Andy?”

“What do you mean, what the fuck? Are you really telling me you’re mad at me for dying now, after you’ve been seeing my sister for actual years and never coming here?”

“No, just...what the fuck, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Andy. “But I’m mad at you for not coming, even though I shouldn’t be.”

I could have started a fight right then, but I didn’t want to. No one wants to be seen yelling at a grave, and I couldn’t have blamed Andy for being mad, or figuring I’d never turn up. I was the one who blew him off until I needed someone, and left him making excuses for me while I went off to see Pippa, and never called him or went to see him.

“You could have called too,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Andy. “I know.”

I stuck the cigarette in my mouth and lit it. There wasn’t anyone around to yell at me or kick me out.

* * *

“You look cool when you smoke,” Andy said. 

I snorted. “Trying to get me to stop? Reverse psychology?”

Andy leaned back against the gravestone, as if he was solid. Maybe he was; I hadn’t asked.

“Maybe it’s reverse reverse psychology. Trying to get you to die and join me.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, taking another drag and exhaling into the trees above me. Somewhere in the branches, sparrows twittered, at me or something else. 

“What can I say?” said Andy. “Maybe I was just trying to pay you a compliment.”

“Really.”

Andy shrugged. “Or maybe I was hitting on you.”

“What about your fiancee?”

“She’s moved on,” Andy said, waving his hand. 

“How do I know you aren’t two-timing me, seeing her every day I’m not here?”

“Just trust me, baby.” A flash of white teeth, a quicker smile than he’d ever shown me before. 

“I can’t believe you’d just steal your sister’s man like that.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

* * *

The more often I went to see Andy, the more often I wondered if I might run into one of the Barbours there--probably not Mrs. Barbour, or Kitsey, but Platt or even Toddy. It could just be a coincidence, and I wouldn’t have a reason not to be there. I was Andy’s friend, would have been his soon-to-be brother-in-law. Maybe it was a lifetime of hiding things, carefully protecting lies layered in lies, habits I couldn’t break. Maybe I thought there was something I was hiding, but--talking to a ghost wasn’t something like that, something that could be found or proven, unwound with a paper trail if I wasn’t careful enough. Plenty of people talked to graves; who was to say that I wasn’t one of them?

Maybe what I was afraid of was that they could see Andy too, that this was everyone’s secret that no one had shared, that there was nothing special about me in particular. Maybe Andy’s ghost was just lonely, the way Andy himself had been when I’d known him, lonely and talkative and bored with the company around him (if there was any). Maybe he’d show himself to anyone, even strangers. 

“Can other people see you?” I asked him eventually.

“Maybe,” said Andy. “I don’t think they want to, though.” 

I swallowed my breath. It wasn’t cryptic per se, but Andy didn’t look like he wanted to say much more. I let it go, staring out at a stray cat slinking in between graves.

* * *

Andy was the one who grabbed my hand in his and held it close, wrapped his ghost-flesh around mind, warm the way wooden furniture is after sitting under a lamp. I’d been expecting it to go through me, or to be the temperature of water in the shower first thing in the morning on the fourth floor, or even maybe burning hot. 

“Wait,” I said.

“I was tired of doing that,” said Andy. “I thought you were going to ask the first day, and I always kept kind of expecting you to. Disappointing, actually.”

His mouth said one thing but his hand said another. 

“Anyway,” said Andy. “It’s been a long fucking time since I’ve done any of this.”

He pulled me into a kiss and I tasted ocean water on his mouth.


End file.
